For twenty-five years we have asked the question. This autumn, for the first time, there might be an official place to answer it.
When eleven people gathered at the monastery of Agii Anargiri twenty-five years ago to found this association, they were asking something that had no institutional home: what kind of island do we want Paros to be? We asked it formally in 2012, when we ran our own tourism survey and published Paros 2020. We have gone on asking it in every Bulletin since.
This summer the question stopped being abstract. In late July, a fire crossed the island from Aghairia towards Trypiti, affecting some ten thousand stremmata and forcing settlements to evacuate. Our recycling centre sits closed over an unresolved contract. Our water is desalinated and still not enough. We wrote then that this island has a limit, and we helped launch the petition against new tourist beds; because if we do not know our capacity, we have no reason to add a single one.
The Municipality is now asking a version of the same question. It deserves our answers.
What Re-Imagine Paros is
Behind the platform at paros.tourism-live.com sits something more consequential than a questionnaire. The Municipality has commissioned a roadmap for creating a Destination Management and Marketing Organisation — a permanent body to plan and manage Paros as a destination, rather than the improvised promotion we have now. The work runs in three stages: a diagnosis of where the island stands, a public consultation, and then the plan itself, due at the end of this year. We are in the consultation stage. No closing date has been announced, but it must finish in time for the plan to be written, which means autumn.
Be clear about what such a body can and cannot do. It will not issue building permits, enforce a noise regulation or restore a beach. It will not decide the Local Urban Plan, a separate process, and the one where the limit on hotel beds is actually being argued over. Anyone who tells you this survey settles those matters is overselling it.
What it will decide is what Paros presents itself as, which visitors it sets out to attract, and, most importantly, which numbers the island measures itself by. If carrying capacity enters the official indicators now, every argument we make afterwards has a figure behind it. If it does not, we spend another decade arguing from anecdote.
From autopilot to a decision
Paros already has a tourism strategy. Nobody chose it. It is the sum of thousands of separate private decisions: each permit, each new bed, each additional rental car. And it points in one direction, because that is the only direction an unmanaged market points. A plan is the alternative to that autopilot. Not a plan for more, or for less, but a plan that somebody actually decided.
We have become good at objecting, and we will go on doing it. But objection is reactive: it answers whatever is proposed, one project at a time, always after the fact. A strategy sets the terms before the proposal arrives. This is the moment to move from complaining to fixing.
How to answer, and where it counts
The resident survey is at paros.tourism-live.com/topiki-erevna. You will be asked to register with a name and email. We know that is a barrier. It exists so answers can be separated by group — residents, professionals, officials — which is also what stops the results being waved away as an unrepresentative poll. It takes a minute. Both permanent and seasonal residents can take part, and visiting friends of the island have their own questionnaire.
The whole thing runs to five short steps. Three points are worth knowing before you start.
Step four asks you to choose a direction. It offers four, plainly worded, including keeping visitor numbers where they are and reducing them. This is the question the plan turns on. It also asks which identity Paros should grow into, and which kinds of visitor it should attract.
Step five contains the most important question in the survey, and the easiest to lose. Six sliders ask how strongly water and energy, infrastructure, environmental pressure, residents’ quality of life, the island’s identity and construction limit further development. They begin at zero, and zero means “not a limiting factor”. Skip that step, or hurry through it, and you are recorded as saying Paros faces no constraints at all. Please do not let that happen by accident.
The last question asks whether coordinated tourism management exists on Paros today. Answer it honestly. It is the clearest way to say that what we have is not enough.
Some things the survey does not ask about: housing and rents, short-term rentals, public space, the beaches. Those belong in the proposals channel at paros.tourism-live.com/oi-protaseis-sas, which takes specific ideas alongside the questionnaire.
None of this replaces the petition. Sign that too. But a consultation answered by very few people does not fail quietly; it gets written up as the island’s opinion, drawn from whoever bothered to reply. Which, left alone, means those with the most direct commercial reason to reply.
For twenty-five years we have asked what Paros we want. There is finally a form on which the answer is counted. Let us make sure it is not filled in only by those who profit from the answer being “more”.
Visitors of Paros are invited to take part in the Visitor Satisfaction Survey.
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